Delirium (Delirium #1)(2)
I open my eyes and Grace leans forward, the orange cupped in her outstretched palm.
“No, Gracie.” I push off my covers and stand up. My stomach is clenching and unclenching like a fist. “And you’re not supposed to eat the peel, you know.”
She continues blinking up at me with her big gray eyes, not saying anything. I sigh and sit down next to her. “Here,” I say, and show her how to peel the orange using her nail, unwinding bright orange curls and dropping them in her lap, the whole time trying to hold my breath against the smell. She watches me in silence. When I’m finished she holds the orange, now unpeeled, in both hands, as though it’s a glass ball and she’s worried about breaking it.
I nudge her. “Go ahead. Eat now.” She just stares at it and I sigh and begin separating the sections for her, one by one. As I do I whisper, as gently as possible, “You know, the others would be nicer to you if you would speak once in a while.”
She doesn’t respond. Not that I really expect her to. My aunt Carol hasn’t heard her say a word in the whole six years and three months of Grace’s life—not a single syllable. Carol thinks there’s something wrong with her brain, but so far the doctors haven’t found it. “She’s as dumb as a rock,” Carol said matter-of-factly just the other day, watching Grace turn a bright-colored block over and over in her hands, as though it was beautiful and miraculous, as though she expected it to turn suddenly into something else.
I stand up and go toward the window, moving away from Grace and her big, staring eyes and thin, quick fingers. I feel sorry for her.
Marcia, Grace’s mother, is dead now. She always said she never wanted children in the first place. That’s one of the downsides of the procedure; in the absence of deliria nervosa, some people find parenting distasteful. Thankfully, cases of full-blown detachment—where a mother or father is unable to bond normally, dutifully, and responsibly with his or her children, and winds up drowning them or sitting on their windpipes or beating them to death when they cry—are few.
But two was the number of children the evaluators decided on for Marcia. At the time it seemed like a good choice. Her family had earned high stabilization marks in the annual review. Her husband, a scientist, was well respected. They lived in an enormous house on Winter Street. Marcia cooked every meal from scratch, and taught piano lessons in her spare time, to keep busy.
But, of course, when Marcia’s husband was suspected of being a sympathizer, everything changed. Marcia and her children, Jenny and Grace, had to move back with Marcia’s mother, my aunt Carol, and people whispered and pointed at them everywhere they went. Grace wouldn’t remember that, of course; I’d be surprised if she has any memories of her parents at all.
Marcia’s husband disappeared before his trial could begin. It’s probably a good thing he did. The trials are mostly for show. Sympathizers are almost always executed. If not, they’re locked away in the Crypts to serve three life sentences, back-to-back. Marcia knew that, of course. Aunt Carol thinks that’s the reason her heart gave out only a few months after her husband’s disappearance, when she was indicted in his place. A day after she got served the papers she was walking down the street and—bam! Heart attack.
Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.
It will be hot today, I can tell. It’s already hot in the bedroom, and when I crack the window to sweep out the smell of orange, the air outside feels as thick and heavy as a tongue. I suck in deeply, inhaling the clean smell of seaweed and damp wood, listening to the distant cries of the seagulls as they circle endlessly, somewhere beyond the low, gray, sloping buildings, over the bay. Outside, a car engine guns to life. The sound startles me, and I jump.
“Nervous about your evaluation?”
I turn around. My aunt Carol is standing in the doorway, her hands folded.
“No,” I say, though this is a lie.
She smiles, just barely, a brief, flitting thing. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Take your shower and then I’ll help you with your hair. We can review your answers on the way.”
“Okay.” My aunt continues to stare at me. I squirm, digging my nails into the windowsill behind me. I’ve always hated being looked at. Of course, I’ll have to get used to it. During the exam there will be four evaluators staring at me for close to two hours. I’ll be wearing a flimsy plastic gown, semitranslucent, like the kind you get in hospitals, so that they can see my body.
“A seven or an eight, I would say,” my aunt says, puckering her lips. It’s a decent score and I’d be happy with it. “Though you won’t get more than a six if you don’t get cleaned up.”
Senior year is almost over, and the evaluation is the final test I will take. For the past four months I’ve had all my various board exams—math, science, oral and written proficiency, sociology and psychology and photography (a specialty elective)—and I should be getting my scores sometime in the next few weeks. I’m pretty sure I did well enough to get assigned to a college. I’ve always been a decent student. The academic assessors will analyze my strengths and weaknesses, and then assign me to a school and a major.
The evaluation is the last step, so I can get paired. In the coming months the evaluators will send me a list of four or five approved matches. One of them will become my husband after I graduate college (assuming I pass all my boards. Girls who don’t pass get paired and married right out of high school). The evaluators will do their best to match me with people who received a similar score in the evaluations. As much as possible they try to avoid any huge disparities in intelligence, temperament, social background, and age. Of course you do hear occasional horror stories: cases where a poor eighteen-year-old girl is given to a wealthy eighty-year-old man.